New Sentences: From Drake’s ‘Survival’

‘My Mount Rushmore is me with four different expressions.’

— From “Survival,” the lead track on Drake’s new album, “Scorpion.”

Mount Rushmore — the gigantic collection of souvenir busts on America’s national mantel — has become, in recent years, shorthand for greatness of any kind. It is a modern parlor game. We ask each other, about every subject: Who is on your Mount Rushmore?

The challenge is always to pick only four. Each figure has to be individually great but also collectively meaningful — together, your quartet must support, like pillars, the entire history of the subject at hand. The differences are as important as the similarities. It’s always harder to choose than it seems.

Drake, however, has no difficulty choosing at all. His Mount Rushmore includes four Drakes. It’s a classic rap boast — his ego is so monumental that it becomes a literal monument. What I love about this all-Drake Rushmore, though, is that it doesn’t depict him at different ages, or in different phases of his career, or with different beard styles. The variations come down to just one thing: facial expression. Drake is, above all, a performer of moods. His most delicate emotional modulations — anger, melancholia, joy, pain — are the wellspring of his multi-multi-multi-platinum success.

And so his Rushmore joke, in addition to being funny, is also in some sense correct: It probably would be an appropriate tribute to carve, in granite, each little shift in the muscles of his face and eyes and mouth, each outward sign of his very famous internal states. Mount Drakemore, eternally feeling all the feels.

Sam Anderson is a staff writer for the magazine.

Sign up for our newsletter to get the best of The New York Times Magazine delivered to your inbox every week.